Image verification issues when copying to an external USB drive

I am experiencing a strange issue with Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. I have a number of workstations that are scheduled to image their 'C:' partition overnight. As part of this scheduled job the image file is verified. I periodically copy these image files onto an external USB drive for off-site storage.

The issue I have is that when I copy the images onto an external USB drive and then use Acronis to verify the copied images, it occasionally reports that the image is corrupt. This doesn't happen all the time but often enough to have me concerned. This corruption only appears *after* the image is copied onto the external USB drive. I can re-verify the original image file still on the workstation and it is fine. If I re-copy the image file from the workstation onto the USB drive, the problem is normally fixed. I have tried copying images from different workstations and tried different USB drives but I still get this occasional problem. This issue is really bugging me because I am now having to verify images multiple times to ensure they haven't become 'corrupt' during the copying process from one drive to another. After reading many forum posts about image file corruption, I am a little skeptical whether the image file is truly corrupt. I have also run Memtest86 on the workstations and it didn't flag any problems.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks....

 

I had the same problem, got no help from paid tech support. They blamed it on my "USB driver." Frankly, I feel that a USB problem is unlikely. To test this, I used a checksum program and never got any errors copying multi-gigabyte files to the drive. Also, opening the supposedly unverifiable files showed them to be intact as far as I could determine: I could explore them and extract any file I wanted to. Looking around the forum, others seem to have had the same issue, which I suspect is a bug in TI 11.

Finally, seeking the easiest path, I bought a firewire enclosure, remounted the drive in it, and have had no further problems with the issue.

 

Instead of using TI to verify the image on the external drive use a MD5 program to verify the check sums, it will probably be far quicker. This problem has been reported for a number of years, it has usually been put down to the USB chipset, either in the computer or in the external drive.

 

Unfortunately, even if the checksum verifier is happy with the file, if you need to use it in place of ATI, then ATI might not be able to come to terms with the file and that's what will count when one attempts to do a restore. You very well might have to move the file back to an internal disk and verify the checksums again or just see if ATI can do a restore with the file.

 

Since the files validate fine when they are recopied back to the internal drive, they are definitely not corrupt. Rather, the validation process is somehow failing, and I suspect a compatibility problem with your USB chipsets. What are you using? NEC chipsets are generally considered to be the least problematic. I've had very good results using Belkin USB 2.0 cards with NEC chipsets.

 

How big are the backup image you are copying? Some hardware has problems with huge files such as backups. Sometimes splitting the backup into 1-4GB pieces solves the problem. It's worth a try if your backups are large.

 

Hello,
I experienced this problem already, but.....
The Image corrupted was found only if the image was done on external drive connected with USB2.
Now i backup my partitions only on internal drives, and then copy the image to USB external drive, and compare the result (MD5). Sometimes the two huge files do not compare (external drive gives image corrupted), i have to copy it again on external drive. It seems that the USB is not so reliable for huge files (>5 Gb).
The problem is definitely NOT with ATI. I got the same problem copying ISO DVD images (>4gb) in USB drives.
Now i have also external eSata drives, and images files are not corrupted anymore.
Jean

 

Unreliable Serial Bus

 

Yeah right
You have companies that solve problems, and you have companies that stick their head in the sand and blame everyone else...